Possibly, however, it may be replied that 'government by natural laws' is a phrase which Positivists never use except metaphorically, and by which they never mean more than certain successions of events.[47] Very well. Either, then, they acknowledge no real government of phenomena at all, in which case to speak of phenomena as governed by law is, if not a purely gratuitous mystification, as glaring an instance as can well be conceived of a 'bare enunciation of facts, put forward as a theory or explanation of them:' or, if they do recognise real government, then they must suppose that, behind those mere mental abstractions, laws or order of Nature, there must be some lawgiver or other being that originally issued the laws, or ordained the order, and still enforces them, or maintains it. But if this be the positivist faith, then, that we may discover its other self, we have only to go still further back; as far back, however, as to the theological stage, supposed to have been so early left behind, yes, even unto the deities or deity that the metaphysical entities had displaced. Positivism, in short, is in this dilemma: either the mode of thought claimed by it as peculiarly its own is simply that process so justly ridiculed by Comte himself as the 'naif reproduction of phenomena as the reason for themselves,' and by Mr. Lewes as 'a restatement' (by way of explanation) 'of the facts to be explained;' or it is at any rate nothing more than a return, either to the metaphysical or to the theological mode of thought, according as one or the other is adopted of the only two interpretations that can possibly be placed on its own nomenclature. A new mode it certainly is not. It is either no mode of thought at all, but merely an empty form of words; or it is at best only a new name for one or other of two old-fashioned modes, both of which its author denounces as false from the beginning, and now worn out and obsolete into the bargain.